


Desert Diaries

by fanoftheknight



Series: More Than Words [4]
Category: Game of Thrones (TV)
Genre: Gen, Jorah being Jorah, More Than Words backstory, army days, difficult themes - read with caution, it also has angst because hey...this is me we're talking about, it does have Mormont Man Pain though, so it doesn't actually have any Jorleesi but is set in the backstory of More Than Words
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-07
Updated: 2020-06-17
Packaged: 2021-03-04 02:08:13
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 4
Words: 18,973
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24585844
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fanoftheknight/pseuds/fanoftheknight
Summary: It wasn't just Jorah who wrote about their experiences in Afghanistan...Based in the 'More Than Words' AU
Relationships: Jorah Mormont/Daenerys Targaryen
Series: More Than Words [4]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1495487
Comments: 40
Kudos: 27





	1. Beric

**Author's Note:**

> Okay, so this is pretty much an experiment whereby I challenged myself to write in the first-person (which is not my usual style) and I wanted to explore Jorah's time in the Army a little more.
> 
> This series of 'stories' is set in the 'More Than Words' AU and will have entries from the following characters:
> 
> Beric  
> Jorah  
> Thoros  
> Mary
> 
> I'm not sure if there's any interest or audience for these stories as they are set in a time before Jorah and Daenerys actually meet and even if no one reads them, it was a fun experiment to try!

The mess tent was heaving by the time I arrived this morning. I grumbled underneath my breath at the fact that most of the good grub had been eaten already, leaving me with the charred, chewy bits of bacon, cold toast and rubbery eggs. It didn’t exactly look appealing, but it was better than going hungry. If there was one thing I learned quickly when I joined the Army, it was to eat whatever was put in front of you, especially in a time of war.

The reason for my lateness? I’d been looking all over the camp for my Captain, Jorah Mormont.

Today was the fourth anniversary of the death of his wife and child. That day was one that I would likely never forget.

Jorah and I were both teenagers when we signed away our lives and joined the Army and while I was a single man, Jorah was already married and had a kid on the way, despite not even being twenty. We were just finishing our basic training when Anais, his wife, lost their baby.

Those first few months of basic training were some of the worst weeks of our lives. We went from being bright-eyed kids to disciplined, serious soldiers. Days spent running through boggy marshes and soggy fields had a way of bringing men together and it was during those tough days that Jorah and I began to form a friendship that has lasted throughout the years. I honestly can’t remember which one of us introduced Thoros to the mix (neither of us willing to admit to being at fault for it), but the three of us stuck together like shit on a bedsheet.

Glancing across the mess tent, I spotted the captain sitting in the corner by himself, his posture and facial expression daring anyone to come near him. He’d always been a morose kind of fellow, all too given to brooding in silence, but this time of year always dragged my friend further down into a pit of despair and misery, his sullen disposition enough to frighten even the hardiest of men away.

Well, most men anyway.

“What do you want?” 

I smiled at my friend, who also happened to be my superior officer.

“I’d like to sit and eat my breakfast, if that’s alright with you?” I replied, well aware that I was goading him.

We didn’t call him a ‘bear’ for no reason. Tall and powerfully built, Jorah was the very embodiment of the powerful creature we likened him to, especially when it came to his moods. There were very few people who dared poke the bear - namely Thoros and me. The only reason he didn’t maim us?

Our shared history, before and after the war in this god forsaken sandpit started.

Some men said that Mormont had only risen through the ranks because of his father. Colonel Jeor Mormont had spent his life in the Army, as had his father before him. Jorah was an easy target for the jealous and the cowardly, none of them having the balls to say as much to his face.

It had been Thoros and I who consoled Jorah after his second child was stillborn and he struggled to come to terms with his grief. Those months were hard on him and no one was more surprised than I was to hear that several months later, Anais was pregnant again.

All of the signs were that, this time, everything would go well with the pregnancy. I remember how happy Jorah was when he showed Thoros and I a photo of his unborn son’s scan. I remember laughing when Thoros told him, “I hope he ends up looking like Anais and not you, you ugly fucker.”

Those months passed by in a haze and I’d never Jorah look so happy and relaxed. He smiled more, laughed at Thoros’ jokes and even joined in on a few of the nights out with the rest of our regiment when we were stationed in Germany, where the ale and the women were both freely available to thirsty young men like us.

While Thoros and I filled our boots, Jorah didn’t even so much as look at anyone but his wife. She was nice, in a plain sort of way, and he’d always been good to her. His eye had never wandered to look at another woman when he had a wife at home. He indulged in the ale, but never once stepped out on his wife.

While the child had yet to be born, Jorah was totally enamoured with the thought of becoming a father, so much so that while on a few days leave from our base, he bought the little tyke a Bayern Munich top with the name ‘Mormont’ on the back. It was far too big for a new-born baby, it would have been months before he’d be able to put it on his son.

But he would never put that shirt on his son.

We had been halfway through morning parade when the message came down that Anais had gone into an early labour. The baby wasn’t due for a few more weeks yet and it was the first and only time that I’d ever seen my friend in such a state of panic.

The sergeant major took pity on him and gave him permission to leave on the understanding that our whole company would ‘wet the baby’s head’ on Jorah’s return.

It was not to be.

Thoros and I waited for hours and as the time dragged by, I began to feel a growing sense of unease as afternoon quickly turned to evening.

Around 9pm that night, the captain of our regiment asked Thoros and I to step outside the barracks, the look on the man’s face telling us everything we needed to know.

“Find him and stay with him,” our captain ordered. “Don’t let him out of your sight.”

The Army taught us to be brave and unyielding, even in the face of the of the worst horrors that mankind was capable of, yet I freely admit that I was terrified of what we would find when we finally found our friend.

Thoros and I searched high and low for him and finally tracked him down to the house he shared with his wife. Being married meant that Jorah was eligible for family housing and away from the single men in the barracks. By the time we arrived at his front door, it was obvious that he was in a state of distress, so much so that one of the neighbours had called the military police.

Thoros blocked the MPs way while I steeled myself for what I would find when I opened the door.

“The man’s just lost his wife and child,” I heard Thoros say as I took a few steps inside the house. “Let the man grieve, for fuck’s sake.”

The MPs said something in return, but I paid it little heed as I went in search of my friend. I found him in the living room, sweeping framed photographs from the mantlepiece, his hands already bruised and bleeding from whatever he’d trashed before we arrived. So enraged, he didn't hear me enter the room.

“Jorah…buddy,” I said, wincing at my own words. What could I possibly have said that would make any of this better? 

What the hell do you say to a man who has lost his whole family in the blink of an eye?

Whatever anger that had spurred him left quickly and I caught him by the shoulders as he stumbled to the floor. With his head in his hands, I held him while he wept.

It was the first and last time I ever saw Jorah cry.

He didn’t cry at their funerals, he only stood stock still and stared at the ground. He didn’t cry as we lost friends fighting wars that were not of own making and while he hadn’t shed a tear since, I’d never seen him so much as laugh either.

I wanted to sit next to him, to goad him into something other than the sorrow-induced torpor he would fall into each year on the anniversary of his wife and child’s death.

My friend and superior officer responded with a sigh as he pushed his half-eaten plate of breakfast away from him. “I’m not in the mood, Beric,” he answered me tiredly.

I scoffed at that, taking a swig of the lukewarm coffee I’d poured myself from the pot.

“Oh, you’re in a mood alright,” I told him, ignoring his growl that unnerved so many of the younger soldiers on the base. “No one dares come within ten feet of you with a face like that.”

He glowered at me, yet I’d known him long enough to know his bark was far worse than his bite.

“You have a face like a bulldog chewing on a wasp,” I told him as I tried to swallow the cold, rubbery eggs. “You’ve frightened the other men away.”

I saw him shake his head before taking a gulp of his own coffee. No doubt he’d been knocking the stuff back since he woke this morning. He never slept soundly during this particular week of the year and it was obvious as to the reason why.

“Maybe they’re a lot smarter than you,” Jorah groused as he shot me another dirty look.

I shrugged my shoulders as I continued to eat my breakfast, nodding to Thoros as he joined us at the table.

“You as well?”

Thoros laughed at him. “And good fucking morning to you, too.”

I couldn’t help but smile. Thoros and I were far too familiar with this annual routine, we would tag-team our friend for as long as was needed to make sure he came out from his obligatory week of purgatory relatively unscathed.

It was a game the three of us often played, but that didn’t mean Jorah was going to make it any easier for us. Despite its familiarity, the stubborn bastard wouldn’t give us even a sniff of any kind of opening we could use to draw something other than grunts and growls from him.

“I’m sure you have better things to,” Jorah grumbled at us. “Like your job, for instance.”

His terse words lacked the added bite that would send many of the men under Jorah’s command running and crying for their mummy.

Thoros shot us both a shit-eating grin as he shovelled food into his mouth.

“The big guy gave us a rest day,” Thoros said around a mouthful of food, some of which hadn’t quite made it into his mouth, despite its size.

The ‘big guy’ being the sergeant major who oversaw our mass sprawling camp as a whole. While there were several commanding officers…captains and the like, everything went through the ‘big man’ before it got rolled down the pike to the grunts like Thoros and I. Even though I was now a lieutenant and Thoros a sergeant, we still answered to Jorah and him to the sergeant major.

At least this one seemed to have a sense of decency and care about the men under his command. That hadn’t always been the case.

Before we were given our orders to ship to Afghanistan, we were stationed at a barracks back at home. Widowed and childless, Jorah had moved back into the barracks and shared bunks with the rest of the men, despite the growing number of stripes on his uniform. 

I could understand why. What man would want to return to an empty house, day after day, knowing that he’d never see his wife and child again? At least having some company might have helped to take his mind off of his own brooding.

Against my advice, Thoros tried to set him up with a number of women, telling Jorah that he needed to ‘get back on the horse’ and ‘shag it all out of his system’. It was only Jorah’s loyalty as a friend that stopped him smacking the shit of Thoros for even suggesting such a thing.

Each time Thoros set him up with a girl (under the pretence of Thoros meeting him for a pint at the local pub), Jorah would politely dismiss himself from their company, placing enough money on the table that the young lady could enjoy herself and then leaving to return to the barracks.

Men in the Army are incorrigible gossips and a rumour began between some of the soldiers that questioned why Jorah had yet to find another girlfriend. Almost two years after losing his wife and child, he remained single and many soldiers had seen him refusing the company of the latest girl Thoros had tried to set him up with.

Thoros and I were at the local pub one night enjoying a few pints when a loud-mouthed soldier questioned why Jorah wasn’t with us. Nearing the second anniversary of losing his family, I knew only too well why he wanted to shut himself away and brood.

“Where’s your boyfriend?” Someone shouted from across the bar. The man had obviously noticed the lack of Jorah’s presence.

The copious amount of alcohol the young man had drunk obviously gave him enough liquid courage to verbalise what so many of the junior soldiers had been whispering about for months.

I put my hand on Thoros’ arm and shot him a look, silently pleading with him to ignore the drunken ramblings from the bolshy little shit.

“I heard the captain likes his birds with a beard…and balls,” the soldier rambled between hiccups as he stumbled towards us. “Which one of you is his bitch?”

I can’t even remember who threw the first punch, but it quickly descended into a bar brawl that was eventually broken up by the MPs. Several of us were arrested and spent a night in the brig.

It was Jorah who came to release us the following morning with a look of resigned disappointment on his face. No doubt he’d been made aware of the reason for the fight breaking out in the first place.

“Go and grab a shower, I’ll deal with you both later,” Jorah grunted at us before turning his back.

Even though the three of us were friends, Thoros and I were under no illusions that there would be a hefty punishment coming our way sometime soon.

I’d expected Jorah to put us on sluicing duty until we’d learned our lesson and apologised for the part we’d played in the brawl. Thoros and the drunk might have started it, but I managed to get a good few licks in myself before it got broken up.

Jorah gave us the silent treatment, but that was expected given the hell the brawl in the pub had raised on base. Any attempt I made to apologise to him was met with a withering stare and a pained sigh.

Thoros was sure that we’d gotten away without punishment for the part we played in the fight and after three days of silence, I was beginning to think the same.

The fourth day after the brawl was one of the hottest days of the summer and we’d barely seen Jorah after the morning’s roll call. Neither of us thought much of it until later in the day, when some of the soldiers on the base started getting excited about something that was happening down in the parade square. 

I heard soldiers making bets with each other on how long ‘he’ would last.

“He’ll never make it too 100!” one of the men crowed before a cheer went up as whoever ‘he’ was had obviously proved them wrong.

“Fuck, the sergeant major is a sadistic bastard!” Someone else shouted. “He’s making him do push-ups now!”

I’d been trying to read on my bunk, but the noise my fellow soldiers were making made it impossible to concentrate. I dropped the book on my bed and pushed my way to the window to see what the hell was happening.

My heart sank as I saw Jorah teeming with sweat and his arms shaking wildly as the sergeant major bellowed at him from above.

Roose Bolton was a nasty piece of work at the best of times, but he seemed to reserve most of his venom for Jorah. Maybe it had something to do with the fact that Jorah had received several promotions in a short space of time. The sergeant major seemed to take it as a personal insult and had never been on the best of terms with Jorah’s father either.

I watched, frozen to the spot as Jorah slowly pushed his way to ninety push ups, only to have Bolton kick his legs out from under him.

“Oh dear,” Bolton said, his voice dripping with sarcasm. “You’ll have to start over again. I want one hundred push ups with no errors. We’ll stay out here all day if we have to.”

I knew that Bolton would push him to the point of collapse and there would be no way he’d let Jorah get to one hundred without interfering. 

I grabbed Thoros from his bunk and dragged him by the shirt down to the parade square, ignoring his grousing as we finally made it to where Jorah and the sergeant major were.

“Oh, how lovely, Mormont. Your friends have decided to join us.”

I remember my heart thumping painfully in my chest at the sight of my friend. His clothes were sodden with sweat as his limbs shook with the effort of keeping his body in the correct position to start the push-ups once more.

“What the hell is going on?” Thoros said, completely ignoring the fact that he was talking to a superior officer.

Bolton let out a dramatic sigh. “The captain here refused to punish you for your indiscretions earlier this week. He’s decided to take it for you.”

My breath caught in my throat as Jorah’s arms gave out underneath him, sending him sprawling to the ground on the hot tarmac. I willed him to stay down, but the stubborn bastard pulled himself up and started again.

I pleaded with Bolton to let Thoros and I take the punishment as Jorah kept faltering, falling to the ground over and over again.

Bolton wanted to prolong his sick sense of torture as long as he could, but I could see Colonel Tywin Lannister making his way towards us. Scowling, Bolton nodded his agreement.

I don’t think I’ve ever done one hundred push-ups so quickly in my life. Both Thoros and I threw ourselves to the ground and wordlessly took our punishment. I faintly remember Colonel Lannister barking something at Bolton as we finished the last handful of push-ups.

As soon as Bolton was out of sight, Thoros and I picked our friend up from where he lay panting so hard that he was hyperventilating. We each took an arm and dragged Jorah back towards the barracks and I could feel how frighteningly hot he was as his head sagged to his chest.

We finally managed to drag him into the shower stalls and I quickly removed the top half of his clothes as Thoros turned the water to cold as I sat with Jorah, his back to my chest as I tried my best to keep him conscious.

It was a losing battle and even Thoros’ salty remarks about Jorah’s favourite football team failed to rouse him. Thoros and I looked at each other, unsure of what to do next. We were debating the subject when Jorah suddenly called out, waving his arms out at something unseen, begging whoever or whatever it was to stop.

“Please…no!” Jorah shouted as I tried to stop his flailing arms. “Father….please don’t!”

The ruckus Jorah was causing was enough for many of the men in the barracks to come and see what the hell all the noise was about. Thoros didn’t need telling twice to send them on their way, barking at them to bring the medics as soon as possible.

It seemed like hours had passed before the medics arrived and took Jorah to the infirmary. I must have sat in that shower stall for hours, my clothes soaked with water, before I finally found the energy to get up and change into a dry uniform, the other men in our unit keeping a respectful distance from Thoros and I and staying out of our way.

We received a message a few hours later to make our way over to the infirmary and were greeted by Captain Davos Seaworth. Even though he was roughly the same age as us, time had not been kind when it came to his hair, which was already greying and beginning to fall out.

“You’re the ones that found him?” Captain Seaworth said, looking up from the clipboard in his hand and glancing at us over his glasses.

“Is he ok?” I asked. I had no idea whether we’d done the right thing by dragging Jorah to the showers, but he’d felt so hot that I couldn’t think of anything else.

The doctor gave us a serious look. 

“He’s lucky you intervened when you did,” the doctor replied. “He was minutes away from a massive myocardial infarction.”

“What, like a heart attack?” Thoros asked.

The doctor nodded. “I mean exactly like a heart attack.”

Thoros shook his head. “Bollocks, he’s not even thirty yet. There’s no way he would ever have had a heart attack.”

The doctor’s eyes narrowed. “Severe dehydration and physical exhaustion could cause a heart attack in even the fittest athlete, soldier.”

“But he’ll be ok?” I asked, fear gnawing at my innards.

The doctor scratched at his greying beard. “We’re working on getting his heart rate down, it’s still over one hundred beats per minute and that’s putting stress not only on the heart but also his other vital organs. The severe dehydration is causing complications with his renal functions. He’s not in great shape at the moment.”

“But he will be?” Thoros asked again.

“Put it this way,” the doctor said. “I’ll not be letting the man out of my sight until I’m satisfied that he’s fit enough to return to his normal duties.

“Bolton’s going to love that,” I heard Thoros say under his voice.

The doctor had heard him.

“Sergeant Major Bolton can fuck himself sideways with a broom handle for all I care. Captain Mormont is staying here until I say otherwise.”

I’d never really been a fan of doctors at the best of times, but this one certainly earned my respect.

We visited our friend each day, talking to Captain Seaworth and his nurses and getting regular updates that we could share with the rest of the men in our unit. Bolton’s actions had not gone down well when it became common knowledge that he could have killed Jorah that day.

I remember arriving at the infirmary early three days after the incident and speaking to the young female nurse who often worked the night shift on the ward. She looked like she’d had a rough night.

“Everything ok?” I asked her. Her eyes cast toward Jorah’s bed.

“Captain Mormont has had a restless night,” she answered, pushing her hair back from her forehead. “His body temperature spiked, and it seems like he’s been reliving some unpleasant experiences.”

As if on cue, I heard Jorah call out to Anais. 

I followed the nurse to his side as she readjusted the bedsheet and pressed various buttons on the machine beside Jorah’s bed. I didn’t miss the tender way she laid a hand on his arm and said something I couldn’t hear. Whatever she said seemed to have the required effect as Jorah let out a sigh as his eyes fluttered shut.

Jorah seemed to be improving after the fifth day and was grumbling about how he wanted to get out of the bed and go back to the barracks. Thoros and I had just arrived when I heard Captain Seaworth let out a tired sigh.

“Take these things out of me,” Jorah grunted, and I could see him pointing under the sheet at the catheter that had been attached to him since he’d been brought in. “I’m quite capable of going for a piss.”

“It’s staying in until I’m completely sure that you haven’t bollocksed your kidneys entirely, soldier. You’re lucky they’re working at all.”

“I need to get out of here,” Jorah grumbled, his head falling back to the pillow in defeat. “When can you discharge me?”

“When I’m certain that you won’t fall flat on your arse the moment you stand up,” The doctor shot back. “You try to pull the catheter again and I’ll write you up for a colonoscopy.”

The doctor smiled as Jorah grumbled, crossing his arms over his chest as much as the tubes and wires would allow him to.

“I knew you’d see things my way eventually, captain,” the doctor replied, noting something on Jorah’s chart and then motioning for Thoros and I to follow him to his office.

“I have concerns about Captain Mormont,” the doctor said as he took off his glasses and rubbed a tired hand across his face.

Thoros narrowed his eyes at the man. “I thought you said he was getting better?”

“Physically, he is.”

“Then what’s the problem?” I asked, feeling the fear in the pit of my stomach.

“It’s no secret on base that Captain Mormont lost his wife and baby a few years ago and I’m concerned as to whether he’s actually come to terms with that yet.”

I’d seen first-hand the way that Jorah had grieved over many long and difficult months.

“What he put himself through the other day,” Captain Seaworth said, “that isn’t normal behaviour for any rational man.”

I wondered if the doctor understood Jorah at all - the man was loyal to a fault to anyone he considered a friend. He was a stubborn soon of a bitch too.

“I’m no psychologist,” the doctor continued, “but it would be my recommendation that he see one.”

Thoros snorted at that. “You’ll have more luck trying to pull your brain out of your own arse than Mormont seeing some sort of shrink.”

“Well, if he does anything this ridiculously stupid again, he might not have a choice,” Captain Seaworth replied.

It’s been a thought that has plagued me ever since that day. Though Jorah recovered quickly enough and was back to light duties after a fortnight, I watched him like a hawk, looking for any signs that he was playing fast and loose with his own life, needlessly risking his safety as if his life had less meaning than everyone else’s.

Having been in this shit hole of a sandpit for nearly two years now, it was a thought that crossed my mind more than once. Jorah, as a captain, had no need to accompany his men on daily patrols. The stripes on his shoulders meant that he’d earned the right to sit in the COs tent and while away his hours playing poker while the ‘grunts’ did all the heavy lifting.

We were losing men regularly, many of them returning home in a coffin or confined to a stretcher as countless military planes took them back towards the safety and comforts of home, and it was this particular week of the year that gave me most concern when it came to Jorah.

Although he’d never needlessly risk the lives of the men under his command, the same could not be said for himself, and I was starting to believe that maybe Captain Seaworth was right in the fact that Jorah seemed to have some sort of death wish.

As we finished our breakfast in the mess tent, Thoros chirped up. “I hear Corporal Haynes is being stationed out here next week.”

I rolled my eyes at Thoros. We were meant to be supporting our friend, not poking the bear and gaining his ire.

Jorah scowled but made no move to hit Thoros and I have to admit that I was half expecting that he would. Things had not ended well between Jorah and the woman who helped nurse him back to health.

Corporal Tanya Haynes was the nurse who had worked under Captain Seaworth at the base back home and had sat with Jorah during those restless nights of his recuperation after the events with Bolton.

A few days into Jorah’s convalescence, I’d started thinking that perhaps something more was happening between them than being a nurse and patient. My theory proved to be right as several weeks later, Jorah had confessed that he’d asked her out for a drink and the two of them had been seeing each other ever since.

Even Thoros was happy to see that Jorah had finally come back to the land of the living, so much so that he toned down his wisecracks considerably as a sign of respect for his friend.

I’d genuinely hoped that Jorah and the corporal would make a go of things. They certainly looked good together and she even made him crack a smile every once in a while. I was beginning to hope that Jorah’s relationship with Tanya would start to heal some of the deep-seated wounds Anais and the baby’s passing had caused him. Although he was never the liveliest of conversationalists, Jorah seemed lighter and happier with Tanya by his side.

I remember the day that Captain Seaworth released Jorah from the infirmary and Thoros and I made the effort to be there to welcome him back to the barracks.

“If I see you in here again any time soon, you’ll get that colonoscopy, is that clear, soldier?”

I smiled as Jorah scowled at the doctor. “Crystal,” he replied.

“Well then, off you fuck,” the doctor said as he nodded his head towards the exit.

We’d almost reached the door when Corporal Haynes called out to Jorah and handed him a notebook and pen.

“You forgot this,” she said as he reluctantly took it from her. “Just think about what I said, ok?”

It wasn’t until the night he and Corporal Haynes broke up that I understood the significance of that notebook, when Tanya tearfully thrust it into my hands and told me what had happened between them.

I listened to her as she told me that she’d asked Jorah to move in with her and that she wanted to eventually marry and have children with him. His response was one of sheer terror that the past would repeat itself and that he would lose Tanya too. The Jorah Mormont I know would never have called it off for another other reason than to protect the woman he loved. As much as it hurt him, he called time on their relationship to mitigate the risk of losing her completely.

“I know why he did it,” she told me tearfully. Jorah was the type of man who would rather sacrifice himself than risk those around him getting hurt. “I’ve comforted him in my bed after the nightmares. I know he thinks he’s doing the right thing…but he deserves to be happy, he deserves to forgive himself. It was never his fault.”

I knew that only too well.

“Tell him to think about what I said,” she said as she walked away. I could see her shoulders shaking as she sobbed.

I’ve held on to the notebook ever since, even bringing it to the desert with me. Tanya told me that she hoped one day that Jorah might use it. What he would use it for, I don’t know, but now seemed as good a time as any to hand it over to him.

His eyes widened as he looked at it. 

The edges were slightly tattered from being thrust into my duffle bag but none of the pages had been used. Jorah sat staring at it across the mess table as men began filing out and preparing for roll call.

“Tanya said you’d know what to do with it,” I said as I drained the last of my coffee and made to stand.

I expected him to leave it on the table in the mess tent. It surprised me when he picked it up and took it with him, nodding his thanks.

“I hope it helps,” I said as we left the mess tent together.

Little did I know that my actions that day would lead to Jorah finally beginning the healing process that he’d denied himself for so long. Never again did I see him on the base without a notebook in his hand and the stories he told his men became the stuff of legend as he slowly learned to let go of the past and the awful things that had happened to him.

Did I expect him to become a best-selling author? Hell no, but if anyone deserved a little good fortune in their life, it was Jorah – a man that I was not only proud to call a friend but also a brother too.


	2. Jorah

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> WARNING:
> 
> This chapter contains scenes that some people may find upsetting. Please read with caution.

Sitting on the side of my bunk as I laced my boots for another day’s patrol, my eyes fell onto the notebook that my friend Beric had thrust into my hands several weeks earlier.

Both he and Thoros knew that I was never at my best around the anniversary of the death of my wife and unborn son and that I would want to sit in silence and castigate myself for the part I played in it.

Even now, weeks later, I’m not sure what possessed me to take the notebook from him. Maybe it had something to do with the dream I had the night before. Every year I would be haunted by their faces and never had they been more affecting than the dream I had a few weeks ago.

I had often dreamed of the life I would have had if they were still alive. Anais would be nearing her thirtieth birthday and our little boy, Noah, would almost be old enough to start school. Yet last week I dreamed that Noah was a grown man, looking down at me with disappointment, telling me that my cold demeanour and distance had affected him so badly that he never wanted to see my face again.

I woke in a cold sweat that night realising that, whether I liked it or not, I was turning into my father.

Hadn’t he done the same thing when my mother died?

I’ve always remembered my father being strict and quick to discipline me for even the smallest indiscretions and while my mother was able to temper that side of his nature, once she died I was left at the mercy of his mercurial moods, never sure which version of my father would walk through our front door each evening.

I told myself that not letting anyone get too close would protect the people I cared about from getting hurt. After losing my mother at such a young age and then losing my wife and child, I knew that I would bring anyone I loved to ruin if I stuck around too long.

I comforted myself with the thought that I was protecting those people I cared for so that it would hurt far less when I lost them. Those thoughts were cold comfort on the lonely nights I spent reliving some of the worst days of my life, my gallantry a poor shield for the maelstrom of thoughts that would haunt me, night after night.

I’ve never been one to put too much stock in dreams and whether they are a portent to our past or future selves, but that dream about Noah stuck with me, sinking its claws into my very being and refusing to let go. It would suffocate me if I didn’t deal with it, or maybe it was the shame and pity that was threatening to devour me whole. 

Tanya told me much the same thing the night I broke up with her.

She had cooked us dinner and I could tell that there was something on her mind. I knew her well enough to pick up on the fact that she seemed distracted as we ate that night. Worried for her, I asked her what was troubling her, and it was then that she confessed that she wanted to settle down, marry and have children.

I remember the blood draining from my face as she looked at me full of hope and expectation, except all I could think of was the pain of losing Anais and Noah. Losing them had almost killed me and Tanya wanted me to risk it all again for her.

My actions were cowardly, but I told myself that Tanya would thank me for it in the long run, that she would find a man who deserved her, that she would have the children and the life she’d always dreamed of, just not with me.

She burst into tears when I told her that I couldn’t give her what she wanted, begging me to change my mind. She knew that I could no more change my mind than I could forget the past and the dream I once had of raising my son with the wife that I’d lost.

“You need help,” Tanya told me through her tears. “You can’t live the rest of your life blaming yourself for what happened. It’ll destroy you.”

“Better me than you,” I told her, holding her for what I knew would be the last time.

She pulled away and searched through one of her kitchen drawers until she found the notebook she’d given me when I’d been discharged from the infirmary at the barracks several months ago, all of its pages still unused.

“Please, Jorah,” she said as she held the notebook out to me. “You owe it to yourself to at least try. If not for your own sake, then do it for me.”

She had no idea what it was that she was asking me to do. Doing as she asked might very well have opened Pandora’s Box and I had no idea if I’d ever be able to close the lid on it again. It was just a book to her, but it was the physical manifestation of everything I buried deep inside of me. I had kept it hidden away inside the darkest corners of my mind, hoping that one day it would cease to exist if I ignored it for long enough.

It may have been just a book to Tanya, but to me it was as if she were handing me a live grenade one in which no one would survive the fallout from, so I turned away from her, refusing to look back as she cried and begged me to stay, for I knew that if I looked back, even for just one second, I would be lost forever.

Noah thrust that book into my hands in that dream, just as Tanya had done the night I broke up with her, except this time I took it without even thinking about what I would do with it.

When Beric handed me the notebook as we sat in the mess tent the following morning, something inside told me to take it and at least try to write something in it, for the memory of Noah, if nothing else.

And so with a rest day and with nothing but my own thoughts to keep me company, I picked up a pen and began to write, not even paying much attention to the words on the page and only stopping when my hand began to ache from overuse.

I’m not sure how many hours I spent on my bunk, scribbling onto the pages of that tattered notebook and I was surprised when Thoros stuck his head in my tent and told me dinner was being served. I locked the book away for safekeeping, not wanting anyone to read its contents and as I sat down to eat with Thoros and Beric, I felt strangely lighter than I had in years, and certainly since the day I lost Anais and Noah.

What started as an experiment soon became a daily habit and when asked by the sergeant major what I would like as a gift from home, I asked for a number of notebooks. The ‘big man’ looked at me like I’d grown another head, but I was fast running out of pages in the book that Tanya had first bought for me and then handed on to Beric.

Pulling myself to my feet, I checked my gear for the last time, making sure that my guns were fully loaded and my Kevlar body armour was secured to my body, and gathered the rest of my men to return to the small village roughly twenty clicks from our basecamp.

Although the village was fairly small, it sat on a key route and one that prevented the Taliban from making inroads to the neighbouring towns and from there, the cities. Holding the village meant that we could slow the Taliban’s progress and protect the thousands of innocent people who were otherwise caught in the crossfire of this seemingly never-ending war.

We had been on rotation with two other units from our regiment, taking it in turns to guard the access route that ran through the centre of the village for over two weeks now and although the villagers were rightly wary of us at first, they soon became used to our presence and I learned enough Farsi to at least exchange pleasantries with locals.

While their parents were wary, the children of the village looked at us with bright, shining eyes, many of them having never seen people with skin different from their own colour. While most of the children had no shoes to wear, they played football with a ragged, half-deflated ball with the same amount of vigour as a Premier League match.

Thoros brought a football to our next visit to the village and it became an instant hit with the children who demanded through gestures and tone of voice that he play a game of football with them. Thoros looked at me expectantly and I nodded my head, knowing that we had more than enough men to cover each end of the village sufficiently.

Thoros was aware that we had a job to do while stationed in the village and so acquiesced when I ordered him to get back to his duties. As he did so, I let another one of my men continue the game of football with the children, who were only too happy to spend their days running around chasing the leather ball. My men had seen so many horrors in this godforsaken desert that they deserved to indulge in some normality, even if it were only for a short space of time.

On our fourth visit to the village, several of the men in my unit brought shoes and trainers to give to the children, having asked for them to be sent from home by their family and friends. The parents nodded their thanks and I replied in broken Farsi that my men were only too happy to help.

The children even began picking up some English and I frowned at Thoros when one of the young boys scuffed a shot at goal and shouted in frustration, “Shit on a stick!” 

Thoros responded with a nonchalant shrug of his shoulders as he ruffled the boy’s hair.

By the second week, my men had started bringing chocolate bars and any other types of sugary treats they could get their hands on. The children of the village would always respond enthusiastically and gather around anyone who dug into their backpacks and handed out the sweets. I knew my men were spoiling them, but who was I to stand in the way of their happiness out here? My men deserved some normalcy, for a few moments at least.

“We should teach them how to play cricket,” Thoros said as he sat next to me in the jeep as it made its way back to the village for what would be our tenth visit. 

I cocked an eyebrow at him. “Where the hell did you learn to play cricket?” I scoffed at him. The image of Thoros and his loud-mouthed antics did not exactly lend itself to a genteel sport such as cricket. Thoros was, if anything, the antithesis to what was commonly known as the ‘gentleman’s game’.

“Don’t look at me like that,” Thoros groused as he scratched underneath his helmet. “One of the men who ran the foster home taught us how to play.”

The mere mention of the foster home was a stark reminder to me that Thoros had not had the easiest of lives growing up. He told Beric and I one day, shortly after meeting him, that his mother had been either unwilling or unable to care for him and from the age of two he had been passed from foster home to foster home, constantly moving every few years when he outgrew his current placement.

Thoros told us of how once a child was over five years old, their chances of being placed with a foster family or adopted were virtually zero and the bitterness was clear in his tone. “No one wants you when you’re no longer all cute and adorable. No one wants a kid who is old enough to answer back and give you grief.”

And so Thoros spent most of his childhood in foster homes, full to the brim with other children just like him. On his eighteenth birthday he was given a birthday card and then his marching orders, being told by the foster home manager that he no longer qualified to come under their care. With no family and no home to go to, Thoros was left with one option - to join the Army.

The peripatetic way of life in the Army seemed to suit Thoros, perhaps because of his upbringing and never staying in one home too long. He dealt with the constant moving from base to base far better than many of the other soldiers our age, but I was keenly aware that his ‘love them and leave them’ attitude when it came to women was born of an inner need to protect a heart that had already been hardened by the social care system when he was a small and defenceless child. Perhaps Thoros was too much like me in that respect, always keeping people at arm’s length and never letting them get too close for fear of losing them.

But I had seen something different in Thoros recently and I was only too aware that those children from the village had something to do with it. 

Thoros always deflected any well-meaning comment with a caustic reply and like as dog raising its hackles when cornered, he snapped and bit at any hand that was foolish enough to try to feed him. Thoros made it clear that he neither wanted nor needed anyone’s sympathy and for any woman that dared get too close, he would turn tail and leave them heartbroken, seemingly oblivious to the carnage he left behind in his wake.

For the first time since I’d met him, I saw a gentler and calmer side to Thoros as he played football with those children. Gone was the mouthy, argumentative man and in his place stood a kind and patient father figure who the kids seemed to naturally gravitate towards.

Beric even mentioned it at the mess table last night, once Thoros was out of earshot and on the search for seconds when it came to dessert.

“God help me for saying this, but I think Thoros would make a half-decent parent one day,” Beric told me as we finished our lukewarm apple crumble, the bitter taste of poorly made powdered custard still sticking in my throat. How Thoros could stomach seconds was anyone’s guess.

I snorted as I swallowed a cupful of water, trying to rid my mouth of the taste of the congealed custard.

“Well, let’s just hope that poor kid gets his mother’s looks then,” I’d replied with a wince as Thoros caught us looking at him and gave us the middle finger in response.

As soon as we arrived at the village, I could already sense that something was wrong by the wailing noises coming from close by.

One of the mothers was kneeling on the floor, screaming and crying as she leant over what looked like a small body.

It was fortunate that we’d be joined on today’s patrol by a translator, so I ordered the driver to stop our truck so that he and I could jump out and find out what was going on.

Stepping out of the truck, I noticed that the streets that were usually full of children were now deserted and there wasn’t only one small body lying on the floor but several.

I motioned our translator to the woman closest to us and asked him to find out what had happened, yet as soon as I was close enough to see what lay at her feet, I already had my answer. 

Lying on the floor was the dead body of one of the children my men had played football with, the trainers on his feet staring back at me accusingly. There was foam around his mouth and it was clear that his last moments of life had been painful and torturous as his stiffened limbs were stretched as if he were straining and struggling to breathe.

The translator looked at me mournfully.

“All she is saying is that her boy is dead. That someone killed him.”

I nodded my head and motioned for the translator to follow me through the village and it took all my willpower not to look down at the several children lying cold and lifeless in the abandoned streets. We finally came across a man who begged us to help his little girl as he held her in his arms, her mouth overflowing with foam as her limbs contorted in a horrific rendition of pain. I already knew that it would be too late for her.

The light in the young girl’s eyes faded as quickly as it had been there only moments before, and it took us several minutes until we could ask the man who had just lost his daughter what happened.

I stood still, frozen in abject horror as the translator relayed the man’s story about a young boy from a neighbouring village carrying a box of chocolate bars and treats and giving them out to the children under the pretence that the British soldiers had sent them.

I knew it would have been all too easy for a child to slip past our blockades and any soldier would have assumed the boy was one of the locals and not questioned his movement to and from the village.

Whatever was in those sweets certainly wasn't just chocolate. They had likely been laced with some sort of poison and I felt agonising pain in the pit of my stomach when one of the villagers showed us the box and the remaining candies inside. I noticed something stuck to the bottom of the cardboard box and pried it free with my pocketknife, handing it to our translator. The look he gave me telling me that whatever it said wouldn’t be good.

“All traitors must die,” the translator said as he passed the piece of paper to me. “The day you cavort with our enemy will be your last.”

The contents of my stomach reached my mouth all too fast and I turned to the side to retch violently, gasping for air as I placed my hands on my knees and spat the remnants of vomit from my mouth.

The Taliban must have been watching the village for days, waiting for a time to strike to cause maximum carnage and they had done so in the most brutal of ways, by taking the lives of innocent children. Children who did not choose to be caught up in the middle of a war, children who only wanted to run around and play football. Those dear, sweet children were punished for a crime they had not committed, and I could feel the cold sweat pouring down my back at the realisation that I would have to break the news to my men.

My heart almost stopped when I saw Thoros exiting the truck from the corner of my eye. He fell to his knees and wept at the senseless loss of these young lives. I had no idea what to say to him or any of my men as we stood stunned on a road that only yesterday was full of laughter and life and now only held pain and sorrow.

Once I regained my wits and my bearings, I asked the translator to find out where the bodies should be buried. I knew it was a heartless question to ask, but between the heat and humidity, I knew it wouldn’t be long before the lifeless bodies of those children would begin to fester and rot, bringing disease and who knew what else in its wake.

The translator pointed to a field on the outskirts of the village and a spot beneath an old tree and without saying a word, I grabbed the first shovel I could find and marched my way over there and beginning to dig. 

Others from my unit joined me after a while and between us we dug a hole large enough to lay the children to rest. I told my men to stand down and that I would carry each of those bodies to the burial site, as my men had witnessed far too much horror today already. All of those men obeyed my orders except Beric and Thoros and I had neither the willpower nor inclination to argue with them about it, so the three of us walked back and forth, carefully cradling a dead child in our arms and laying them gently in the ground.

Thank the heavens that we had a translator with us as I’m not sure what we would have done otherwise. We had no idea as to culture or religion or what kind of burial was most appropriate for those kids and the last thing I wanted to do was insult the grieving parents who had just lost their children.

The drive back to base that night was one of the longest I can remember. Not one of us was able to articulate the day's events and instead we sat in silence as the tyres of our truck rumbled over rocks and rubble, the truck bouncing every once in a while as we followed the rough tracks back to our ‘home’.

Beric and I exchanged worried looks, fully aware that Thoros had said barely a word all day and was far removed from the gobby, cheeky upstart we knew him to be. He spent the whole ride back to base with his head in his hands and staring at the floor of the truck.

I tried to get Thoros’ attention as we disembarked from the truck back at the base, but he shrugged me off angrily, telling me to ‘get out of his fucking face’. Normally, a man under my command would be written up for speaking to a superior like that, but I let it slide, knowing Thoros was probably hurting much more than the other men in the unit.

“Let him go,” Beric told me as Thoros brushed past us and we made our way to the mess tent. I needed something to eat before relaying my report to the sergeant major that evening.

I pushed the food around my plate and despite my stomach growling, I found myself unable to swallow anything, especially today’s events. Here I was, eating a meal that although was tasteless and bland, certainly wasn’t laced with poison. I was far luckier than those poor kids we had to bury today.

Beric and I must have sat in the mess tent for more than an hour, just staring at our still-full plates of food, neither of us having an appetite for anything except our sorrow and grief.

“Captain, I think you better come out here,” one of the men under my command said as he poked his head around the tent flap closest to our table. 

I looked at him quizzically.

“It’s the sergeant,” the solider explained and it was then that I heard the commotion going on outside.

I got to my feet quickly and made my way over to Thoros who had clearly got his hands on some alcohol, judging by the state of him. He was stalking through the camp, half-dressed and waving an almost empty bottle of vodka around.

“What the fuck are you all staring at?” he slurred, gesturing with the bottle in his hands. “There’s nothing to see here,” he said, almost tripping over his own feet.

The commotion had certainly created a crowd as soldiers all over the camp began sticking their heads out of their tents to watch what was happening.

I made my way over to Thoros, gesturing to Beric to take his other side as we knew it was unlikely that Thoros would come willingly.

“Get your hands off me,” Thoros shouted as I caught one of his elbows and Beric the other. 

It was lucky that Thoros had drunk most of that vodka as it made it easier for us to keep our grip on him as he weakly struggled to get free.

“I’ll fucking kick your arse if you don’t let me go,” Thoros raged at me. “Captain or not, I’ll beat those stripes _and_ the shit out of you.”

I ignored him completely as Beric and I dragged him back towards the tent that housed our bunks. The closer we got to the tent, the more the righteous anger drained away from our friend and soon he was following us limply towards his bunk. I could feel his shoulders shaking with the effort not to break down entirely.

As I dragged Thoros towards his bunk, Beric ordered the soldiers in the tent to leave immediately and one look at their lieutenant’s face was enough for them to follow his order without question.

“They’re dead,” Thoros said quietly, his bottom lip trembling as he looked at me. It was as if someone had removed every bone in his body as he collapsed into my arms and wept. “It’s my fault,” he sobbed as I held him tightly. “It’s all my fault.”

There was no point trying to tell him otherwise when he was in such a state. In between the alcohol and his grief, there was no way either Beric or I could reach the rational part of Thoros’ mind that told him that he was foolish to think such a thing.

“It’ll be ok,” I told him, wondering how the hell that would be true for a man who had lost his childhood not once but twice now. Despite his better judgement, Thoros had let those kids into his heart, a heart that he’d once thought bitter and frozen. Spending time with those kids had thawed the layers of ice around it and allowed it to beat freely once more. He’d let them in and lost them, just like he had everything else in his life.

Beric and I stayed up with him all night, making him drink water when he was a conscious enough to do so and placing a bucket underneath his chin as the vodka came back up several times during the night. We were soldiers and not nursemaids, but we were also friends with this difficult and complicated man, and we owed it to him to see him through until the morning. Our friend was hurting and neither of us would stand back and watch him suffer alone, telling ourselves that Thoros’ night of drunken behaviour would be his last.

Little did we know that it was only the beginning


	3. Thoros

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> This chapter comes with a warning as it contains mentions of substance abuse. Please read with caution.

God, I felt like shit when I opened my eyes this morning.

I wasn’t sure it was still morning; it was too hard to tell in this godforsaken sandbox what time of the day it was. Only two things were guaranteed: that the sun would rise, and the sun would set, you were just never sure what time of the day that might be.

I had way too much to drink last night, I didn’t need anyone, friend or otherwise to tell me that. I shrugged off the constant disparaging looks from my fellow soldiers and ignored the concerned glances from Beric and Jorah. They might have been my superiors when it came to rank, but they were my friends first and foremost, with the three of us joining the Army at the same time.

I can’t even remember what brought us together in the first place, our backgrounds and histories were wildly different, yet there was something that brought the three of us together, some sort of common goal that threaded the three of us together in a knot that had become so tight, I don’t think anything would ever unbind us.

The first time I met Beric Dondarrion, I thought he was a rich, posh, well-spoken twat and someone I would have nothing in common with. It was well known at the base that Beric came from a rich, well-to-do family, had received the best education money could buy at Eton with his voice making him sound more like a royal than a soldier.

I remember Beric telling me one night over a pint of beer that he’d only ever joined the Army just to piss his father off. Apparently, Beric Senior had wanted his son to become an accountant or a lawyer. He might not have been able to dodge the private education and upbringing, but Beric had been resolute in wanting to cut his own path as an adult.

“You’re fucking mad,” I told him over that pint of beer. “Why are you rolling around in the shit with the rest of us grunts when you could be sitting at home in your smoking jacket spending daddy’s money?”

He gave me a sour look. 

“Because I want to piss the fucker off, ok?”

I had to laugh, even when swearing Beric sounded like he’d not only been born with a silver spoon in his mouth, but the whole fucking cutlery drawer too.

And piss the man off he did, indeed, so much so that Beric’s father refused to attend the passing out parade when we’d finally finished our basic training after three gruelling months of hard work. It had only been his mother and sister there to cheer him on.

At least he had a family.

I tried not to be bitter about my own upbringing and spending time with Beric and Jorah made me realise that we were all victims of our childhoods, as different as they might have been. For Beric it was the weight of his father’s expectations and for Jorah it was the effort to make his father proud.

Colonel Mormont, Jorah’s father, was a piece of work, constantly switching from concerned parent to control freak authoritarian, the changes between the two coming so thick and fast that Jorah, the poor fucker, hardly knew his arse from his elbow at times.

I still have no idea why Jorah ever gave me the time of day when we were young, fresh-faced recruits. Where he was sullen and quiet, while I was the loud-mouthed little shit that would dare to say what everyone else was thinking. We seemed to have so little in common when it came to our personalities and behaviour, but maybe we were just what the other needed - me adding a little humour to Jorah’s dour ways and he the quiet contemplation that my constantly overworked mind needed in order to shut itself off every once in a while. And Beric? He was the one who bridged the gap between the two of us with his pragmatic approach to life. Somehow, we all came to rely on the parts of each other that were missing in ourselves and as dysfunctional as we might be at times, we were family, three brothers united by something more than blood.

We’d been through our fair share of shit together, no more so than when Jorah lost his wife and kid. Barely twenty-five years old and he went from being a husband and soon-to-be father to a widower in the blink of an eye.

Beric was the one brave enough to approach Jorah the night his wife and son died, and I, like the coward I am, stayed outside waiting for the storm to pass, pretending that sending the MPs away with a flea in their ear was doing Jorah a favour. 

The months after certainly didn't pass without incident and Beric and I became increasingly concerned about Jorah’s behaviour. He’d always been a stubborn shit, but the day he took a punishment for us was when it all came to a head.

We learned after the incident in the parade square when Sergeant Major Bolton had run Jorah into the ground, that Jorah had refused to punish Beric and I for the bar brawl a few days earlier. Never one to enjoy being disobeyed, Bolton made him run hundreds of laps of the square, refusing to let him have any water from his canteen bottle and spending hours pushing the man past any reasonable feat of human endurance.

Jorah could have told him to fuck off and walk away but he stayed and took the punishment as if he deserved it, as if he was somehow to blame for the death of his wife and child. It was crazy and no one would ever think that was true, yet to Jorah it was just another fucking stick to beat himself with, so much so that the doctor who treated him told us that Jorah needed some sort of professional help.

That was never going to happen in a month of fucking Sundays, but that didn’t mean that Beric and I were going to stand back and let our mate torture himself for something that wasn’t his fault. While that had been fairly easy to do at home, it became a whole lot fucking harder out in the desert when you needed eyes in your arse just to keep yourself from being shot by a sniper or blown to fucking pieces by an IED.

Just a few short months ago, we got caught in an ambush in a deserted village and Jorah took a sniper’s bullet in the back and all because he ran headlong into the firing line to drag a fellow soldier that was as good as dead back to safety , even when he could have sent any one of us grunts out there to do it for him.

That helicopter ride back to the base was one of the longest I can remember and the vision of them sucking the blood out and shoving a tube down his throat still haunts me now. It brought home how easily any one of us could die in the blink of an eye.

Of course, we’d lost a lot of men already but when it’s your mate who’s seen you through thick and thin, it brings a whole other level of reality down on you, smacking you in the face like a bitch. Jorah, my captain, stood by me when we lost those kids and I drowned my sorrows in any sort of alcohol I could find. After every bender, I promised him that it would be the last time, that tomorrow I would go cold turkey and never touch another drop.

Each time I downed another scotch or swallowed a mouthful of vodka, I told myself that I was justified for behaving like that. If anyone else had lived the life I had, they’d fucking drink themselves stupid too. I told myself that getting drunk and raging at the world was acceptable for someone like me and while off my nuts in the middle of a bender I could accept what I was doing when I was pissed. It was only when the cold light of day crept in and brought a raging hangover in its wake that I would kick myself for being such a selfish prick.

I knew Jorah was disappointed with me each time I turned up for roll call more than a few minutes late and definitely the worse for wear. He never said much about it though, just gave me that look that said he was disappointed with me for once again breaking my promise.

I don’t even know what started my drunken descent last night, all I know is that one more swig from the bottle seemed like a good idea at the time. The more drunk I got, the less the faces of those children and their parents would haunt me. I didn’t need them to visit me in unconsciousness to tell me how badly I’d fucked up, but booze was the only way I could switch my mind off and find a restful sleep. Drinking yourself unconscious has some benefits, that was for sure.

I poked my head outside of the tent, trying to ascertain what time of the day it was, probably late by the look that Beric gave me as he approached.

“You missed roll call,” he said with the type of practiced resignation that was fast becoming the soundtrack to my life.

“Is the captain pissed off with me?” I asked, looking around for Jorah and his look of disapproval.

“Well, he was hardly doing a merry dance,” Beric bit back, his tone making it crystal fucking clear that he was pissed off with me.

“I best keep low for a while then?” I joked, cocking an eyebrow at my friend.

Beric shook his head. “Don’t bother, he went in the truck to guard the medic convoy, seeing as you were nowhere to be seen.”

Oh, I’d end up fucking paying for that, I had no doubt. 

I’d probably burned my last bridge with my captain and any loyalty he might have felt toward me as a friend was dwindling by the day. Sooner or later, I’d get an arse-kicking and a gobful of epic proportions from my superior. Jorah was notoriously stubborn, but his patience with me had to run out sooner or later and I willed myself for the fucking hundredth time that I’d get myself together and sort my head out.

“How late am I?” I asked, not sure I wanted to know the answer as I covered my eyes with my hand and looked toward the clear blue sky above us.

Beric looked at his watch before looking me up and down as if I were an errant schoolboy (I couldn’t deny that even a child was better behaved than I’d been recently).

“Three hours and forty-two minutes,” he replied. “They should be back soon, so you best hide while you can. The captain’s going to tear you a new one after this - “

Whatever else Beric was going to say was cut off by an almighty fucking racket coming from the far end of our camp. All I could hear were sirens and motors running, people shouting and motioning toward the medical tent. 

Beric and I ran toward the commotion and my heart sank as the most awful fucking thought ran through my mind while the medics carried someone from their truck and into the medical tent. We weren’t close enough to see who it was, but the sight of badly burned flesh and the smell that came with it would have hit us from half a mile away.

I pulled one of the junior medics aside and asked what the fuck had just happened. The poor kid looked shell-shocked.

“Our convoy…” the kid began, scratching at his head and shaking like a virgin on a first date. “The truck guarding us ran over and IED. It exploded right in front of us.”

My heart was hammering in my chest, my head telling me that it was the truck Jorah was in - the truck I should have been in today.

“How many were hurt?” I heard Beric ask, his voice oddly calm. We’d only seen a single soldier carried toward the medical tent and from what I could see, he was the only one.

The kid shook his head, tears brimming in his eyes as he looked at us. 

“There wasn’t much left of the driver and the one in the passenger seat…the front of the truck took the worst of it.”

“What about the others?” I asked, knowing that there had to be at least three other men at the back of the truck protecting their tail.

“They were trapped,” the kid answered, wringing his hands together. “We could only get to one of them…the truck was on fire…it exploded before we could go back for the other two.”

Holy goddamn fucking shit.

I felt an icy sensation of dread threatening to drown me. My mate was in that truck when it copped the blast from the IED. 

He was dead. I was sure of it.

“Who was it that they brought in?” Beric asked, his voice measured and assured when I knew that he was shitting his britches just the same as I was.

The kid shook his head again and it took all my resolve not to shake the fucking answer out of him.

“Who was it?” Beric asked him again.

“He was pretty messed up,” the kid replied. “He had captain’s stripes on what was left of his uniform. We got him here as quickly as we could.”

That icy sense of dread crept further inside my body and I could feel my heart thumping in my ears, so much so that I almost didn’t hear Beric ask if the man they brought in was going to survive.

“He’s badly burned…he’s gone into hypovolemic shock,” the young medic responded. “There wasn’t much we could do except get him back here as quickly as we could.”

Beric looked at me, both of us nodding that the only place we were heading was toward the medical tent and no fucker on base was going to stop us from getting to our mate’s side.

It was fucking chaos as we made our way inside, with medics buzzing around Jorah like vultures and he was a frigging carcass. Machines were whining and people were shouting in a language that might as well have been Farsi for all I could understand of it. The closer we tried to get to Jorah, the further resistance we met as an army of nurses and doctors pushed us this way and that in their haste to get to him.

We’d almost reached his side when Corporal Haynes pushed us back, giving us a look that could curdle milk.

“Get the fuck out of here,” she shouted at us, any pretence of the familiarity we might have had missing in this total shit storm of a situation.

“We have to see him,” I begged her. “Please, we need to know if he’s alright.”

She stepped to one side and I finally got a good look at just how fucked up Jorah looked as he lay on the gurney, the medics cutting any clothing from him that wasn’t burned and jabbing needles and tubes into his unmoving body. Even from a distance I could hear his laboured breathing and I thanked every fucking god I knew that at least he wasn’t conscious.

“If you want to help him, get the fuck out of here and let us do our job.”

I tried begging her again but to no avail. Beric grabbed me by the arm and hauled me outside the tent where I promptly threw up the mostly alcoholic contents of my stomach.

I had to be stuck in some sort of horrible nightmare, there was no way that this could be real. I felt my legs shaking and my ears started buzzing. I was sure I was going to pass out at any moment, when Beric landed an almighty slap to my face.

“Oh no, you don’t,” he growled, shaking me by the shirt. “Get your shit together, Jorah needs us, you selfish prick!”

I nodded, straightening my uniform, ready to stand guard outside the medical tent and waiting for someone to tell us what the hell was happening.

We must have waited for hours outside that fucking tent and despite the looks the other soldiers were giving us, I told myself that there was no way I was moving a muscle until I knew Jorah would be ok. As the hours passed, the guilt of my actions the night before began to eat at me, minute by minute, until I could no longer resist the comforting embrace that getting pissed out of my head would offer me.

“I…uh…I have to go and do something,” I told Beric, casting my eyes to my tent and the stash of booze I had hidden there.

He responded by grabbing my arm and punching me straight in the face.

“Oh no, you fucking don’t!” He shouted at me. “You don’t get to run away from this, Thoros. If you move another inch, I’ll beat the living fucking daylights out of you!”

Why couldn’t Beric see that I needed to get away from the sense of guilt that was slowly drowning me?

First those innocent young kids in the village, and now Jorah hovering somewhere between life and death and it was all my fault.

I was damned…cursed to lose anyone I cared about. All I’ve ever done is leave a trail of destruction in my wake. Didn’t Beric know that I was cursed from the day I was born?

All I saw in the eyes of others was judgement, whether theirs or my own, but the booze never once let me down…never once judged me for the shitty choices I’d made throughout my life. Booze was my friend; it would console me in the middle of the night when the demons of my past came knocking on my door.

“Please,” I begged him, trying to free myself from his vice-like grip. “I need to…”

“What about your friend?” Beric shouted at me. “If only you hadn’t - “

He stopped himself before he could finish the sentence, but I knew what he was going to say. He was going to tell me that it was my fault, that I should have been the one in the truck and not Jorah.

Beric looked at me apologetically but the damage had already been done. I already knew that it was my fault and Beric’s words only helped to push the knife in a little deeper.

It was all my fault, so I stood outside that tent with Beric until it got dark and most of the soldiers on base who weren’t on shift were turning in for the night. We’d stand outside the tent all night if we had to but we weren’t leaving until we heard that Jorah would be ok.

It was Corporal Haynes who finally left the tent and spoke to us. I could tell by the look on her face that whatever she was going to say would not be good news.

“He’s not…” Beric asked her, unable to finish the question.

Tanya shook her head. “He’s alive.”

“Will he be ok?” I asked, my voice shaking. I had to know if there was a way I could fix this. I’d put myself through hell if it would make my friend’s recovery any easier.

The sadness in her eyes told me all I needed to know.

“He has full-thickness burns, mainly to his left arm and partial-thickness burns on his chest and shoulder blade. He was in shock and he inhaled a lot of smoke when the truck caught fire,” she said, brushing her sweaty hair back from her forehead as she gave us both a grim look. “We removed as much of the damaged tissue as we could, but he needs a lot more help than we can give him.”

“Will he….will he survive?” I asked, choking on the words.

“We need to fly him home as soon as possible. He needs to be in a specialist burns ward.”

“Can we see him?” I asked, I had to tell him how sorry I was…how it should have been me in that damn truck and not him.

Tanya shook her head. 

“We can’t let anyone near him except medical staff…he’s at high risk of infection until we can get him back home. He needs skin grafts; his burns won’t heal otherwise.”

“But I have to see him,” I begged her. I had to tell him that it was all my fault.

I suddenly found myself wincing at Tanya’s penetrating stare.

“If you want to do something to help him, get his belongings together. We’ve got a plane on the way here so we can send him home.”

“He won’t be coming back?” Beric asked.

This was Jorah fucking Mormont, the man who’d been shot by a sniper and yet carried on as if it were nothing more than an annoying scratch. There was no way that this could be the end of his Army career, not after everything we’d been through together. This wasn’t the end, it couldn’t be.

I heard Beric ask her the ETA of the plane.

“Less than three hours,” she replied. “I can’t stop you standing outside the tent…” she left the sentence unfinished and Beric picked up on it immediately.

“Right you are, then,” he said. “We’ll grab his gear and be back here within the hour.”

She nodded at us and turned back toward the tent when I called out to her. 

“Wait,” I said, “thank you for taking care of him.”

She gave us a sad smile. “It’s my job… but even so, I’ll always care about him, job or not.”

Of all the ways for Tanya and Jorah to be reunited, this had to be the worst possible one.

Beric and I said nothing to each other as we made our way to the tent Jorah slept in while not on shift. He was a man of few items and apart from a couple of changes of uniform, there really wasn’t all that much to pack up for him except some notebooks and a tattered old photo of Anais and Jorah on their wedding day.

Christ, we were all still kids, only hitting thirty and yet we’d been through so much shit together. This couldn’t be the last time we’d all be together, could it?

I picked up the stack of notebooks and opened the page of one of them, intrigued to see what my friend had written in there. It was a well-known fact on base that for over a year now Jorah had been writing stories and when cajoled enough, he would tell some of us his latest idea for his next masterpiece.

Except he didn’t call them that. Any time someone tried to compliment him, he’d shrug his shoulders, look embarrassed and then walk away. The stubborn bastard would never be able to take a compliment without it killing him, of that I was sure.

Captain Mormont and his little notebooks became something of a joke on base and being the kind of man he is, he let his men get away with the gentle teasing if it made them smile or forget that they were in this shit hole of a desert in the first place.

I still remember the look on that kid’s face when we got ambushed in that abandoned village. He was bleeding out despite Jorah’s best efforts to save him and I swear that kid died with a smile on his face as our captain told him all about some girl and her faithful knight.

I never did hear the end of that story; despite the several hundred times I asked my mate to spill the beans and now I realised I might never be able to find out how it ended. I could have sat and looked through all his notebooks for the answer, but Jorah didn’t have time for me to do that. Those books were important to him, he guarded the fucking things with his life, and it seemed that the right thing to do was to make sure they went home with him.

After all of my fuck ups, it was time that I did something right for once.

I slung the duffel bag over my shoulder, and we ran back over to the medical tent to wait for Jorah to be brought out, knowing that it might be the last time we ever saw him.

My breath caught in my throat when they finally carried him out on a stretcher, wrapped in swathes of burns dressings, his eyes closed and a tube down his throat. I saw Tanya whisper something in his ear before the soldiers carried him away and on to a plane that would take him back home.

I couldn’t help the look of disappointment on my face when I realised that I wouldn’t be able to say how sorry I was.

I felt Tanya squeeze my arm gently.

“Being unconscious is the best thing for him right now,” she told me, her voice far more sympathetic than it had been a few hours earlier. “The doctor on the plane will take good care of him until they get him to the hospital.”

I heard Beric ask where they’d take him while I continued to stare at the plane as its engines began turning, making enough racket to be heard ten clicks away.

“Edinburgh Royal Infirmary,” she replied, and I was glad that his family would be close by, even though he and the Colonel had a less than friendly relationship at times. I knew that he still had friends from his days growing up there that would help him get back up on his feet again.

“I’ll keep you both updated on anything I hear from home,” she reassured us. “He knows how much you care about him.. you’ve always been such good friends to him.”

I knew without a doubt that wasn’t true. 

What kind of friend would go off the deep end on a bender, miss their mission briefing and sleep half the day away while his mate took his place?

Jorah’s career, the one he’d worked so hard for was over and he was facing months if not years of agonising treatment for his burns, and all because I was too fucking selfish to think about what I was doing and the effect it would have on those around me.

I was the worst type of friend a man could have. What I didn’t need was meaningless, false platitudes from someone who knew that what had happened to Jorah was totally my fault.

What I needed was a drink.


	4. Mary

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This kind of goes without saying, but this chapter is kinda angsty too...

I ran up several flights of stairs to get the specialist burns unit as soon as I heard the news.

The phone had rung in the middle of the night and Stan sleepily answered it before handing it over to me. I expected it to be the hospital asking me to come in and cover a shift in the A&E department. Friday and Saturday night were always the busiest because it was then that people let loose, drank far too much and found themselves being stretchered into Edinburgh Royal Infirmary for some stupid prank that had gone wrong.

I didn’t particularly enjoy being called in on my night off, but I learned to accept the fact that I couldn’t switch off my ingrained need to care for others when it suited me, even after the boys were born.

Callum and Connor had come along when Stan and I had least expected them to and now five and three, they were starting to come into their own when it came to their personalities. We had always let fate decide when or how we would have children and though it was difficult to balance being a nurse and a mother, we somehow always managed to muddle through.

It helped that Stan’s job was flexible enough to allow him to work from home with only the occasional business trip or meeting taking him away for a few days and besides, he was a wonderful father to our two boys as well as being a loyal and supportive husband. He had to be with all the insane hours the hospital expected its staff to put in. Stan had never once complained about the phone waking us in the middle of the night or the fact that I would have to leave my family unexpectedly to cover a shift at short notice.

Stan was a good man and maybe I’ve been guilty of not telling him that enough.

I answered the phone while still half asleep and I wasn't prepared for the sound of Jeor Mormont’s voice to come on the line. It made me sit up in bed in an instant, it could only mean one thing…

Something had happened to Jorah.

Jorah and I had known each other since we were small children, having lived in the same neighbourhood and coming from families with a strong military tradition. It just so happened that we’ve been through pre-school and all the way through to high school together. While it was common for boys and girls to play together while young, Jorah and I always stuck together, even when we were teenagers.

People used to tease us and say that we were dating when we were kids, but the truth was that we’d only ever shared one kiss (when we were ten years old) and it was nothing more than a peck on the lips. We’d promised to marry each other without really knowing what it meant.

We were both single children and with no siblings to play with, we became what the other needed in their life in that respect. Jorah was the protective brother that I’d always wanted, and I’d always be able to talk him into playing all manner of silly, childish games with me.

He adored my parents and would beg to stay with us after his mother died. It wasn’t until I was an adult and a parent myself that I realised why Jorah would cry and plead with my mother and father to let him stay with us overnight. His father became much harsher with Jorah after they lost the woman they both adored and Jorah had always been a sensitive boy. It was almost as if his father was trying to beat the emotions out of Jorah, to make him hardened to others, but Jorah could never lose that sense of empathy that was such a huge part of who he was.

The older I got, the more I realised just how wrong Jorah’s father had gotten things when it came to his son and never more so when Anais found out she was pregnant for the first time. They were only seventeen and doing what any other teenagers would but hadn’t even considered any type of protection.

I remember seeing Jorah a few days after the news broke that he’d gotten Anais pregnant when he turned up on our doorstep, his bruised lower lip quivering as he looked at me, trying to find any safe port in a storm.

My mother had ushered him inside immediately and being a nurse herself, she checked Jorah over thoroughly before handing him a steaming cup of coffee and cursing his father’s name under her breath.

It hadn’t been the first time that Jorah had arrived at our house with a few bruises on his body, but this time, his father had gone at him badly enough that there was no way Jorah could hide his limp or the way he cradled his ribs when he moved. The black eye and split lip were a foreboding omen to what my mother found underneath when she asked Jorah to remove his top that day.

“It was my fault,” he mumbled as my mother handed him two painkillers and a glass of water, instructing him to take them under her watchful eye.

My mother tilted his chin so that he had no choice but to look at her.

“Whatever you’ve done, you didn’t deserve this,” she said as I made a grab for his hand, tears threatening to spill from his eyes.

My mother looked at him as if he were the son she’d always wanted.

“I don’t want to go back home,” Jorah said, wiping furiously at the tears running down his damaged face. “Please don’t make me go back there.”

My mother kissed the top of his head and pulled him close as he cried.

“You can stay here for as long as you like, son.”

Instead of being surprised by her words, they seemed to be the most natural thing in the world. For all intents and purposes, my mother loved him like a son, and he loved her like the mother he’d lost when he was just a little boy still trying to find his way in the world.

Jorah stayed with us for just under a week before announcing that he was joining the Army and that he and Anais would get married. He was resolute in his promise to take care of Anais and to stand by her and the baby. He was still only a teenager and yet I knew exactly the kind of man Jorah would turn out to be - one that was nothing like his cold, unfeeling father.

It was his father’s voice that brought me back to the present with a bump.

“There’s been an accident,” Jeor said, his voice shaking slightly, betraying a hint of fear for his son that he’d never let be shown before. “They’re flying him home now, Mary.”

I didn’t want to ask the question that preyed on my mind since Jorah had joined the Army. I didn’t want to make my fear a reality by verbalising what I prayed wasn’t true.

“Is he…” I couldn’t finish the sentence. I didn’t want to hear that my oldest, dearest friend was coming home in a coffin.

“He’s been badly hurt, Mary,” Jeor replied, taking a shuddering breath. “They told me his truck ran over an IED and burst into flames. They’re taking him straight to the Royal Edinburgh…I can’t get there straight away so I wondered if you would stay with him until I can?”

I bit back an acerbic response. Trust Jeor Mormont to put his work duties before his own son.

“Do they know when?” I asked, glancing at the time on the alarm clock.

“Within the next few hours,” Jeor replied. “Please, I need to know he’s ok.”

No, what Jorah needed was for his father to be at his side, not at some high-ranking Army function, but I agreed, not for Jeor’s sake but for Jorah’s. He’d likely come back traumatised and having a familiar face might help the man I loved like a brother.

Jorah had already arrived by the time I got to the burns unit and it took all of my powers of persuasion and my authority within the hospital to even be let near the room they currently had him sequestered in.

“Please,” I begged the nurse standing outside the door to his room. “He’s like a brother to me…he needs someone he knows with him here.”

The nurse gave me a long, hard look before relenting, ordering me to put on a face mask, gown and disposable gloves before she let me enter the room. I felt my breath shaking as I walked in, the smell of charred flesh making me want to vomit. I bit it back and moved towards the bed, my eyes meeting those of a nurse who stood the other side, noting his vital signs on a clipboard.

“How is he?” I asked through the face mask, my heart thumping at the sight of the tube running from his mouth to his throat, pumping in precious clean oxygen into lungs that were likely doused in soot from the explosion.

Perhaps the nurse picked up on the fact that my presence in the room wasn’t in a professional capacity. Her eyes softened slightly as she stowed the clipboard back in its holder at the end of the bed, the machines Jorah was connected to beeping and whirring around him. If it weren’t for the tube down his throat and the hideous burns on his body, it would have given the impression that he was merely sleeping and not hovering somewhere between life and death.

“We’re just waiting for his vitals to come up a bit more and then we’ll take him down for surgery to remove the rest of the burnt flesh.”

I knew the Army medics would have done the best they could in debriding the damaged tissue, but they would have been severely limited by the tools at their disposal, not to mention the considerable risk of infection out there in the desert. I wasn’t a specialist burns nurse, but I knew enough to know that Jorah’s injuries wouldn’t heal without several painful skin grafts. The rehabilitation alone would be agony for him.

“When will you take the breathing tube out?” I asked, finding my eyes transfixed on the horrific sight of my closest and oldest friend looking so vulnerable and helpless just lying there.

“After the surgery, hopefully,” the nurse answered. “His oxygen levels are returning back to normal, so we’ll likely remove it when we take him to the recovery ward and the anaesthetic begins to wear off.”

I nodded, my eyes transfixed on the horrific sight of how badly burned Jorah was and I knew that keeping him unconscious was the best thing they could do for him right now. While sedated, he wouldn’t feel the agonising pain as his remaining flesh began to pull and shrivel around the areas of his body that had suffered the most.

He’d feel every single twinge of the remaining nerve endings in his arm and it would likely take months or years for that pain to abate.

There wasn't much point returning home after my visit with Jorah as I had my own shift starting in a matter of hours. I called Stan and relayed what I knew about Jorah’s condition and asked him to give my love to the boys and to tell them that mummy would be home as soon as she could.

As soon as my shift afforded me a break from my duties, I made my way back up to the burns unit to check on Jorah. After donning the same protective equipment as the night before, I entered his room and was relieved to see that the breathing tube had been replaced with an oxygen mask. Taking a look at the chart at the end of his bed, I saw the considerable amount of pain relief they were currently administering to him. It would be enough to take most of the pain away, but not enough that he would be completely unconscious. I sat by his right side and put my gloved hand in his own, not surprised when he gripped it weakly and his eyes cracked open. I could tell by how dilated his pupils were that he had a fair amount of morphine coursing through his veins.

“Where?” He asked me, still not fully aware of his surroundings.

“You’re home,” I told him as I wiped the tears from my cheeks with the hand that wasn’t holding his.

He squinted his eyes and looked at me for several moments.

“Mary?”

I bit back a sob. “Yep, I’m here. You’re going to be ok; we’ll look after you.”

“I need to go back,” he told me, his heart rate jumping a little as he spoke.

He wasn’t making much sense and I knew it was down to the morphine.

“Go back where?”

He blinked slowly several times and swallowed deeply, forcing a cough from his damaged lungs.

“To the base,” he answered, his voice slurring over the words. 

My heart broke at the realisation that he’d likely never go back there again.

By the time that I returned to his room the next day, Jorah was definitely more coherent and awake but with that came the painful reminder of the extent of his injuries. I tried to be quiet but he heard me enter the room and his eyes sprang open. I burst into tears as he reached his right hand out towards me desperately.

“Mary,” he gasped, his eyes watering. “It…it hurts,” he moaned, his words slightly muffled by the oxygen mask on his face.

Jorah had taken his fair share of bumps and bruises from his father when he was a child and he’d never once admitted to the pain they had caused him. My dear friend was the embodiment of stoicism and would never admit to being in pain, even if it killed him.

After removing the remaining charred flesh, they had begun applying a salve to the worst of the burns twice a day in an effort to stop the remaining fatty tissue and muscle contracting to the point where Jorah could lose the use of his arm, the pain he was in further amplified when the doctors cut into an area of his flesh in an effort to release some of the pressure of the burns pulling the skin and tissue that remained further and further towards each other.

I was relieved to see that they’d given Jorah a morphine pump and placed the switch in his right hand. The pump was designed to only give a safe amount of the narcotic, but enough that it would take the edge off of the worst of the pain for a few hours. I’d asked one of the nurses in the unit when Jorah’s next surgery would be when I knew the painful process of skin grafts would begin and allow Jorah to face his next gruelling treatment on his road towards recovery.

I felt Jorah’s eyes boring into me as he gripped my hand with as much strength as his body could muster under the heavy doses of narcotics in his system.

“Please…don’t leave,” he said, his voice barely a whisper.

I nodded, realising that I would need to call Stan and tell him I would be home late today and credit to him, he didn’t argue and instead told me to give Jorah his best wishes and to tell him that he and the kids were thinking of him.

“I wish I could help you,” I whispered to him as I used my free hand to stroke his hair as he twitched and moaned at the pain his damaged flesh was causing him. “I wish I could make this better for you.”

God, how I would have given anything for Jorah not to be in this state. My best friend, my brother for all intents and purposes, was suffering and there wasn’t a bloody thing I could do about it.

I felt helpless.

“My mother,” Jorah gasped as another bolt of agony shot through his weary body. “When I was child and I…” he stopped abruptly and let out a small whimper that reminded me so much of the little boy he used to be. “When I didn’t feel well,” he began again after taking several deep breaths, “she used to talk to me…or read to me until I fell asleep.”

My heart clenched painfully for him all over again, realising that his mother would never be able to do that and that his father couldn’t even be bothered to visit, even though his son had been home for three days now.

I knew what he was asking, and I couldn’t deny him.

I could never deny Jorah anything, he was the closest thing I would have to a brother and now more than ever, he needed his family beside him.

I fished in my purse, frowning as I pulled out a magazine that didn’t strike me as the kind Jorah would read.

“I only have Woman’s Weekly,” I told him.

He gritted his teeth against another fresh wave of pain.

“I don’t care…please…I just need to hear your voice.” I felt his hand grip mine again. “Please, Mary.”

I nodded my head and began reading the celebrity news page, resolute in the fact that I would sit here and read meaningless drivel every day for the rest of my life if it would help Jorah.

And so started a habit of me spending my free time in between shifts and breaks sitting by Jorah’s side and reading whatever I could get my hands on to him. He’d been in the burns unit for over a week when I spotted a duffle bag in the farthest corner of the room. I crept over and opened it while Jorah was sleeping, and my eyes landed on several tatty notebooks. Jorah didn’t seem like the kind of man who would ever keep a journal and so I opened the first notebook and was surprised by what I found.

I carefully made my way back over to Jorah’s side, using one hand to grip his to let him know that I was by his side and my other holding the notebook and turning its pages. I recognised the handwriting immediately, it was Jorah’s, of that I had no doubt.

It was only when a nurse came in to apply another dose of salve that I realised how much time had passed. I’d sat reading the notebook for over an hour, my eyes transfixed by the words that I was reading.

Did Jorah know what he had in his possession?

I’d always been a voracious reader and yet I couldn’t remember a story that had gripped me quite like the one I currently had in my hands. I could scarcely believe that the man I thought I knew so well had actually written it.

Not that I didn’t think he was smart or creative enough to do so, but it was something I’d never really seen from him. Jorah had always been far more interested in playing sports than reading and studying and yet something must have happened for him to suddenly turn to writing stories.

I placed the book carefully back in the duffle bag and placed a soft kiss on Jorah’s forehead as he slept what I hoped was peacefully. I’d ask him about it tomorrow, I told myself.

I was excited to return to Jorah’s room after my shift the next day, but what I didn't expect was to find my friend writhing in agony, begging for someone to help him, tears streaming from his eyes as he whimpered and moaned.

My eyes caught the switch for the morphine pump on the bedside table, far enough away from Jorah that he couldn’t reach it and I didn’t have to think twice about who had done it.

Jeor had finally showed up yesterday and had taken far longer than any reasonable loving parent would to visit their badly injured son. I hadn’t caught much of their conversation, but I did overhear that heartless bastard telling Jorah how only weak men would accept the amount of narcotics they were currently giving him. The tone of Jeor’s voice made it clear that he was disappointed with his son for showing such weakness.

I ran to Jorah’s side and grabbed the morphine switch, pressing it as many times as I could and cursing the fluid from the drip for not dropping fast enough. Jorah’s face was turning a deep shade of red and blood dripped from his lower lip where he’d bitten down on it so hard.

“It’ll be ok,” I told him as my tears flowed. Tears of anger as well as sorrow. “Just hold on for a moment and I’ll get some help.”

I didn’t want to leave his side, but he’d already suffered far too long. They needed to knock Jorah out before he undid all the hard work the surgeons had done with repairing his damaged flesh. I ran to the door and screamed for someone to help me.

Soon the room erupted in chaos and I found myself pushed out into the hallway and I stood there unable to move until someone came and told me that Jorah was ok.

When they finally let me back into the room, the doctor told me that they’d given him diazepam to help calm him and although not enough to knock him out, it was enough to stop him from doing anything except staring glassily at the ceiling.

In between the morphine and the sedative, Jorah was almost immobile, but I could see the tears welling in his eyes, even though he was powerless from stopping his body betraying him as they ran down the sides of his face and onto the pillows. I stayed by his side, reading his own stories back to him until his eyes finally closed and his heart rate slowed enough for me to tell that he’d fallen asleep.

It quickly became a habit of me reading Jorah’s stories back to him and three weeks into his stay in the burns unit, I finished all of the notebooks that returned home with him and so on my next visit I brought him several new ones and a pen.

He gave me a sour look and pushed the books off of his lap.

“There’s no point,” he told me as he closed his eyes, feigning sleep no doubt. We’d been down this road several times already and I was well-versed in the rules of this game we were playing.

“What else are you going to do?” I challenged him. “Sit here and sulk for the rest of your life?”

I was being snappy with him, but he pushed me to it. For the past few days, Jorah had become increasingly sullen and frustrated at what he deemed to be a lack of progress in his recovery. He wasn’t even a third of the way through the amount of surgeries he’d need to repair the extensive damage to his left arm and shoulder, and he was already getting grouchy about it. As much as I loved this man, patience had never really been one of his virtues, particularly when it came to his own health and wellbeing.

He gave me a look which told me that I touched a nerve with my last remark as he let out a resigned sigh.

“I just want to go home,” he told me, his voice quiet.

I wasn’t quite sure what he meant by ‘home,’ but I sincerely doubt it was his father’s house that he had in mind. No, what Jorah wanted to do was to take himself off somewhere to brood and lick his wounds in silence. The Army was the only home he’d known for so long now and Jorah was slowly realising that he’d never be able to return in any capacity that would have kept him happy. He wasn’t the kind of solider who’d be happy sitting behind a desk all day while his men took all the risks.

I pushed the notebook back towards him, smiling when he picked up the pen and began writing something.

“If you behave yourself and keep quiet, you’ll be out of here a lot sooner,” I told him, cocking an eyebrow at him. He knew what I meant - keep yourself occupied, listen to the specialists and let them do their job.

“I want a little thank you note in your first bestseller,” I told him, sitting back in the chair beside his bed.

He looked at me, perplexed. “What are you talking about?”

I rolled my eyes at him. “You should send these to a publisher,” I told him. “People would love them.”

He shook his head at me, his eyes wide with fear. “No, they’re just stupid stories.”

“Stories that could make you a lot of money,” I replied. “You’ve definitely got a talent for this.”

He shook his head again and I had to bite back on a stinging retort. Jorah should have known by now that I could be just as stubborn as he was. Any time we’d had a disagreement as children, he would always be the first to back down and let me get my way and this time would be no different.

I’d send those bloody books to a publisher myself if I had to, but in the meantime, I promised to keep him supplied with enough notebooks to while away the many weeks he’d be stuck in the hospital for. I’d chip away at him, little by little, until he finally gave in and did as I asked.

Jorah Mormont, the man I loved like a brother, was made for better things than just being an injured ex-serviceman - something that I recognised, even if he didn’t.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you to everyone who has read, commented or left kudos for this story. I really didn't think anyone would be interested in it and so I'm very pleasantly surprised at the reaction it's had!


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